Françoise Gilot 1940–1950

June 14–September 24, 2000

This
exhibition presents forty-six paintings and drawings from the first decade
of Françoise Gilot's extraordinary career.

Young Fishmonger, 1942
Oil on canvas, 45.75 x 35

Françoise
Gilot began painting in 1939, just before the German occupation
of France. She continued to draw and paint in order to preserve
the cultural traditions of France and to express the suffering
of her people under a harsh totalitarian regime. However, she
was afraid to openly criticize the National Socialists. When she
did take part in a protest rally against the Germans, she was
placed on a roster of dangerous young people and required to report
to the police station every morning for several months.
Nevertheless,
Gilot found ways to fill her seemingly harmless portraits, still
lifes, and landscapes with symbols of Nazi oppression and the
French people's hunger for freedom.

This staunch
woman is a symbol of strong anti-German sentiment. She wears a
traditional Breton costume. The image captures another time, long
before the trials of the Occupation. Gilot exhorts the French
to cling to their cultural individuality as the Bretons have for
centuries.

This
drawing of a recently butchered rooster is another richly symbolic still
life expressing Gilot's despair at the occupation of France. The rooster,
long a symbol of French national pride and of France itself, lies dead,
ready to be cooked and devoured. The rooster is wrapped in newspaper,
a reference to the papers that brought the terrible news that France was
dead.

Nude
in Profile,
1942,
Ink on paper, 12.5 x 19"

A
celebrated Parisian dealer, Dina Vierny, wrote that Gilot's work
"can be located at the crossway of two giants of modern painting,"
Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. As a young artist in Paris, Gilot
found encouragement in friendships with older artists, including
Matisse. She shared Matisse's desire to capture an image with a
bold, simple line and to create form out of fields of vivid color.

Gilot met Pablo
Picasso in 1943 and invited him to her first exhibition. Even though
Picasso was forty years older than Gilot, the two soon became close,
trading drawings and having long conversations. By 1946, Gilot had become
Picasso's muse and partner. As the relationship developed, Gilot made
several drawings that playfully expressed her ambivalence about becoming
involved with such a powerful, intense man.

In this drawing,
Gilot depicts Picasso as Adam and herself as Eve. However, the roles
are reversed. Picasso holds an apple to Gilot's mouth and forces her
to eat. The image recalls a famous photograph of Picasso feeding Jean
Cocteau, which became a symbol for the ways Picasso's artistic genius
nourished the creativity of other artists. We can also see Picasso's
influence in Gilot's new willingness to distort the figure. She pulls
both of Picasso's arms to the right side of his body to emphasize his
twin gestures of feeding the apple and pounding his fist.

Dynamic
Tensions, 1945, Oil on canvas,
21.5 x 32"

When
peace came in 1945, Gilot felt free to devote herself to disciplined experiments
in abstraction. She wanted to return to the basics of line and form in
order to discover her own artistic language. These tautly structured abstractions
led her to join an artistic group called Réalités Nouvelles ("New
Realities") led by Nicolas de Staël. Its members believed that, after
the atrocities of the war, they could no longer create images of human
beings, only pure abstractions. Refusing to be constrained by anyone,
Gilot soon separated from the group. She began to incorporate representative
elements into her work, creating an ironic or whimsical effect. She also
began a new exploration of the human figure; she distorted the forms of
the body in order to capture the emotional reality of intimate relationships.

Night
Flight, 1948,
Gouache on
paper 26
x 20"

By 1950,
Gilot was considered a major feminine voice for the School of Paris. She
gained a contract with the influential art dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler,
and had her first one-woman shows. She was becoming more and more independent
of Picasso, whom she would leave in 1953. By the time she entered the
second decade of her artistic career, Gilot was a success, painting with
confidence and enjoying great acclaim.